This invention relates to control panels for appliances and the like and, more particularly, to a touch sensitive control panel which provides a binary coded output signal in response to a body portion of an operator touching a selected area of the panel.
Many domestic appliances, such as, for example, sewing machines, microwave ovens, televisions, etc., are presently constructed with touch sensitive control panels. Such control panels typically respond to the capacitive effect of a user's touch for both controlling the operation of the appliance and for providing visual feedback to the operator of such operation. A problem with such a control panel is that it does not provide output signals which may be directly utilized by the appliance control circuitry and therefore a substantial amount of interface circuitry between the control panel and the control system is required.
It is therefore a primary object of this invention to provide a control panel of the type having a plurality of touch sensitive areas in proximate relationship to corresponding functional indicia which provides output signals which may be directly utilized by the control circuitry of the appliance.
A further object of this invention is to provide such a control panel wherein the output signals are in a binary coded format.